Letter: UMass Dartmouth's Leduc Center offers real world education

Critics of higher education bemoan the system's inability to prepare students for the demands of a 21st century workplace and society. They argue that the university's “ivory tower” is averse to civic life and “the real world.” For them, higher education's anachronistic programming, officious wrangling...

Critics of higher education bemoan the system’s inability to prepare students for the demands of a 21st century workplace and society. They argue that the university’s “ivory tower” is averse to civic life and “the real world.” For them, higher education’s anachronistic programming, officious wrangling and misallocation of resources conspire to deny young people a path to a better future; one for which, incidentally, they pay dearly.

The Leduc Center for Civic Engagement at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth provides an award-winning response to such critics. In order to meet the dual challenges of community need and student civic engagement, the center effectively transforms the notion of a university in the community and for the community to one that is of the community and with the community.

Through an array of partnerships with local schools and civic organizations, it places hundreds of university students out in the community each semester while bringing hundreds more school-age students to the UMass campus for service-learning experiences. The Center challenges students to use their education to improve the greater community by contributing over 200,000 hours to service each year.

In recent weeks, I witnessed 200 fifth graders plant thousands of seedlings at the Dartmouth YMCA’s farm as the culminating event of their Kids-2-College experience; had a conversation with a UMD senior who, after spending over 100 hours at Doran Elementary School, is compelled to enter a career in education; and heard from a fifth grade teacher that “now all her students talk about is college.”

While no organization, in and of itself, offers a panacea for improving civic participation across the region, the Leduc Center’s “aspirational” and “actionable” impact on students and the larger community should serve as a supreme example for how the vision, leadership and programming for such an entity might look.